Developing your first plugin tutorial
Plugins intended for use in the Squiz DXP or Funnelback 16 Cloud require a review before they can be used and this is currently only available to internal Squiz developers. |
Introduction
This guide will walk you through the steps to create your first Funnelback plugin. Upon completion you will have a plugin that can be deployed onto a Funnelback instance. The plugin in this guide changes the title of every search result that a user performs, replacing a common prefix if it appears.
Part 1. Setting up your development environment
Plugin development is currently only supported on x86 (Intel) based platforms. |
A suitable development environment should be setup before attempting to write any Funnelback plugins. This guide covers installing the third-party tools that are required for plugin development that do not belong to Funnelback. The plugin guide assumes that these tools are installed and being used to develop the plugin.
Part 2. Generating a plugin
-
Using maven archetypes to generate a template project.
-
Importing your project into IntelliJ and exploring the generated files.
Part 3. Writing your plugin
-
Implementing plugin functionality - Writing the behaviour that talks to Funnelback
-
Documenting your plugin - Telling the world how to use your plugin
-
Testing the plugin - Testing that your plugin does what you told people it would.
Part 4. Packaging and deploying your plugin
-
Building your plugin into a sharable package.
-
Deploying it onto an actual Funnelback instance - so it can run in earnest.
-
Set up a test data source, search package or results page and run it! - Making sure it all worked nicely.
Troubleshooting plugins
-
Debugging and logging - What to do when things go wrong.
Source files
The source code for the title prefix plugin is available from github at https://github.com/FunnelbackPtyLtd/funnelback-plugin-examples/tree/master/title-prefix-plugin.